Tarnished (22 page)

‘Oh yes,’ Doll said, shaking herself as if she were coming to after a dream. ‘She’s an invalid, my daughter. Did you know that?’

On her way out, Peg had a word with a different nurse about the side rooms.

‘They’re sixty-five pounds a night and we can’t guarantee that we won’t need them for acute cases, but they’re free at the moment.’

‘I’ll take one,’ Peg said, suddenly reckless. ‘For my nan.’

She signed the necessary forms, but slipped away before Doll was moved, leaving instructions that she wasn’t to be told the details of who was paying and how much.

On the rackety, delayed train back to Whitstable, she thought about money. She had five hundred pounds credit available on an emergency credit card, taken out when she moved out of the bungalow as a financial safety net. And what was this if not an emergency? But sixty-five only went into five hundred what, eight times?

Eight nights.

By taking on the private room, she had made her statement of intent.

She had finally made her decision.

Twenty-One

Dear Dad,

Sitting at Doll’s dining table, which she had pulled out into the newly cleared lounge floor space, Peg stared at the words. Writing them had set a coldness into her pen hand that even the hissing gas fire couldn’t touch. She took a bite of the pizza she had picked up on the walk back from the railway station – without Loz’s good influence, she was reverting to bachelor-girl form.

She crossed out the words and replaced them with:

Dear Raymond,

That felt better. Less involved. First she had to pretend to eat a slice of humble pie.

I’m sorry about my behaviour when I visited you in Spain.

If nothing else, her fancy schmancy school had taught her how to write a good, formal letter – the clothing for all sorts of intentions.

As you can imagine, while our meeting was hard for you, it was even worse . . .

She scrubbed that last word out.

. . . 
more challenging for me. I am afraid that I quite disgraced myself, both by my behaviour in front of you, and by the way I took my leave. I am truly sorry
.

As Peg drafted, she had her legs, toes and eyes crossed. The language was coming out stiff and wrong, like a Victorian novel, but it seemed to fit the occasion.

I have thought long and hard about this
.

It was descending into cliché. But what could she do? Wasn’t the position she was adopting – that of the contrite daughter – something of a stereotype in itself? She stopped and pressed her fingertips against her eyelids, screwing her cheeks up into her palms. It certainly didn’t reflect the complexity of her actual stance.

How
did
she actually feel? Shocked? Dismayed? That wasn’t it. Because despite his little-man-with-a-big-chip-on-his-shoulder unlikeability, bizarrely, something in her understood Raymond. She felt sorry for the suffering and isolation brought on him by the things he had done in the past, his mistakes.

If he
had
done those things in the past.

She also pitied him because his sister hated him so.

Yet, on top of all of that, still she despised him.

If only he hadn’t been such a twat when they met.

I have thought long and hard about this and, if it’s still going, I would like to take you up on your offer of help
.

There, she had said it. The pact was made. She hoped he was as blind as she suspected. She hoped he wouldn’t see that there was no way the real Peg would write those words. The Peg without the ulterior motive.

But then, what did he know of the real Peg?

I won’t ever bring up the past again, and I will play by your rules. I am sorry to have caused you any upset and I would like us to move forward together
.

Because, with him living all the way over in Spain, how often would she actually have to go and see him face to face? It would be easy to pretend to be dutiful from a distance. Then she could divert the funds to sorting out Doll’s problems. She took a deep breath and forged on.

My immediate problem is that I’ve got myself into a bit of financial difficulty, as it happens. I owe about seven thousand pounds on various bank accounts and credit cards. Can I, as your daughter, ask you to help me out? It would be great to be able to make a fresh start
.

Was that too bald? Or could she get away with it? Peg thought perhaps she had better sleep on it. Slipping Raymond’s business card between the pages to mark her place, she closed her notebook, sat back and looked at the Gordon’s Gin box full of photographs.

Why did Jean react like that to the pictures of the blonde woman?

What was she trying to hide?

It was more than likely that she had been trying, in her own clumsy way, to protect Peg from photographs of her father with his arm round someone other than her mother.

Her reaction had been on the strong side, but then Jean was like that. Hemmed in by her own flesh, her world had contracted so much that the slightest thing – a spilled cup of tea, or burned toast, say – took on apocalyptic importance.

Peg leaned forward, pulled the Gordon’s box towards her and looked in it for the wallet with the other pictures of the blonde woman. She thought she had put it back on the top, but it wasn’t there. She rummaged down into the box, but came up with nothing. In the end, she tipped the whole boxful of photographs out on the floor and went through them carefully. The wallet was nowhere to be found.

Frowning, Peg scooped everything back into the box.

She sat back on the settee, closed her eyes and scratched the material.

The sound of the gas fire began to throb as if someone were playing with the volume. Like in a film, she saw a little boy push a baby, fat-bottomed in terry nappies, off a steep dock wall into the murky tidal Thames. She heard head meet stone then body meet water, then the desperate splashing of a child trying not to drown. Then the image cross-faded to Raymond, moving a pillow to cover her mother’s beautiful face, holding her brown hand down in his own pasty fingers as her life ebbed away. In both scenes, Peg tried to see her father’s face, but the focus kept slipping away. He was there, but she didn’t know
how
he was there. Then his arm grew, like a snake uncoiling, and wrapped itself round the blonde woman. Then the two of them, Raymond and the blonde, turned to her and pointed.

Peg’s eyes shot open.

These were scenes she couldn’t have witnessed, but they were so bold, so vivid, she saw them as if she had been there. How could she be sure that the memories she was recovering weren’t also imagined?

How was she going to find out the truth?

Did she really
have
to find out the truth?

Perhaps she should just give up. Take the money and run. Then let it all lie.

But with what she knew now, how could she?

She pulled her parka from the back of the dining chair, tucked it over herself, and curled up on the settee.

The thing was, she had a niggling feeling she didn’t know the half of it.

Twenty-Two

Shortly before midnight, Peg was pulled from sleep by the buzz of her phone. She blearily held the screen up in front of her and saw that it was a text from Loz.

Gr8! Got last train! Gets n @ 1.30. Drexons?

Excited and dismayed in equal measure – she hadn’t been expecting Loz till the morning, and needed to prepare the bungalow for her arrival – Peg texted back.

I’ll be there Xxx

She spent the next hour sorting out the bungalow. Part of her felt embarrassed that, like some sort of suburban housewife, she would feel shame at Loz seeing the state of the place. But she was powered on by the truly cat-piss-rich stench of the bathroom, which invaded the rest of the house. Peg had always thought it was down to the greasy toilet and the soiled floor around it. She had only been able to stage quick and rough clean-ups when she visited in the past – if she stayed longer than her allotted five minutes in the toilet, Doll would be banging at the door asking her if she was all right in there. So, to avoid cross-questioning on the state of her bowels and force-feeding of laxatives, she had never given it the thorough clean it needed.

Now was her chance, so she scoured the bowl and the floor, threw away the mouldering toilet brush and scraped the dust from the pipe behind the toilet. But even after all this, the smell persisted.

Then she opened the cupboard under the sink.

It seemed that Doll had used incontinence pads, which was news to Peg. And after they were soaked she had thriftily hung on to them, stuffing them into this cupboard so tightly that when Peg opened the door, she was presented with a piss-stiffened papier mâché wall.

With rubber gloves on, she gouged the mess out, bagged it up and put it out the back. Then, after filling another sack with the contents of the bathroom cabinet – enough out-of-date pharmaceuticals to stock a small chemists’ shop, empty shampoo bottles, rolled and squeezed toothpaste tubes, dog-ends of soap, threadbare flannels and used cotton wool balls – she bleached every surface.

A little late, and with bleach fumes still stinging her nostrils, she rushed down to the station to meet Loz. The air was even more brittle with cold than it had been the night before, and, when she got there, the icy platforms were deserted and the ticket barriers open.

Peg wandered onto the platform and sat in a frosted glass alcove, sheltered from the sharp, bitter wind. An almost indecipherable announcement apologised that, due to a signalling failure, the train from London Victoria, due in at one thirty, was delayed by twenty-five minutes.

Peg hunkered down into her parka and listened to the sound of the sea, carried inland by the wind. The delay, the cold, the sodium-yellow light and bitter, metallic tang of the station could have pulled Peg’s spirits down, but her excitement at the prospect of seeing Loz buoyed her. It had been two long days and, even though they were now just over a year into their relationship, her stomach still turned over and the world seemed a little lighter at the thought of her girl. Limerence, it was called. She had found the word in a self-help book.

At last the lights of the train approached, first silently, then, as the engine drew closer, the sound of wheels on rails carried over the night air, swishing in time with the distant sound of the waves. Five seagulls rose from the tracks like grey ghosts, calling into the night sky. And then the train was there, slowing, screeching past Peg and drawing its caterpillar of near-empty carriages to a halt on the platform, showing her the squashed face of a lolling drunk home from a night on the town, his eyes shut, his skin yellow where it pressed against the grimy glass. For a second Peg worried that he might have missed his stop and wondered whether she should jump on and shake him awake. But then she remembered that – to use one of Loz’s favourite phrases – it wasn’t her problem.

She looked up and down the platform. No one was getting off. Peg hurried along the length of the train. Perhaps Loz, too, had fallen asleep. But then the doors beeped and there she was, stepping out of the final door, her hair dishevelled, her long unbuttoned duvet coat almost sweeping the concrete ground.

Peg ran to greet her. With a smile on her face as wide as the train, she swept her into her big, strong arms and there they stayed as the train exhaled and beeped, then slid its doors shut and pulled away into the night.

‘Nearly missed the stop, I was so taken up in this.’ Loz held up a paperback, one of her true crime books.

‘God how I’ve missed you,’ Peg said fondly, wrinkling her nose at the gory cover of the book and doing up the top buttons of Loz’s coat.

‘Me too you,’ Loz said. She stood back, holding Peg’s face in her hands. ‘I’m so excited to see the place that made you.’

‘Don’t get your hopes up too high. Come on. Let’s get you home.’ She took Loz’s big rucksack from her and hauled it on to her back. ‘Jesus. What you got in here?’

‘Stuff for me for a couple of days,’ Loz said, hoisting a bulging cotton shopper onto her own shoulder. ‘And I thought you’d need some more clothes, too. And some books. You left in such a rush. Can we go your seafront way? I really want to see it.’

As they walked down towards the water, Peg told Loz about the letter she had drafted to her father, asking him for money.

‘Quite right too. He owes you everything, Peg.’

‘It’s not for me though, remember. It’s for Nan.’

‘Whatever. Screw him for everything he’s got. Bastard.’

They walked hand in hand until they reached the sea. The moon, just on the wane, hung like a great ball in the sky, streaking silver across the water, outlining Loz’s pale cheekbones as she stood and took it all in.

‘Gorgeous,’ she said. ‘Just how I imagined it. Just breathe in that salty air.’

‘That salty, shitty, muddy air.’

‘Nicer than Leicester Square at chucking-out time though. Can we stop for a minute? Catch our breath.’

They sat on a park bench on the shingle, facing the sea. It was dedicated to a Florence Ivory, who had loved the view.

‘So you’ve got a picture of your mum, then?’ Loz said.

Peg reached in her bag for her red book and slipped out the article with the photograph.

‘She’s beautiful,’ Loz said, holding the paper out in the moonlight. ‘Got your eyes, see?’ Then she bent to read the article. ‘“Tragic Wife Mercy Killing”. Jeeze. Still, in some cases it’s a mark of love. My
oma
keeps going on about wanting Naomi to take her to Zurich.’ She hunched her shoulders and assumed an exaggerated Yiddish accent. ‘Ven my mind goes, I vant you to throw me to the dogs.’